Pocket Digicam Has a Real Tilt-Shift Lens

Forget about those faux tilt-shift effects. When a special effect is baked into almost every consumer digicam out there, it has clearly donned a leather jacket and a pair of swimming trunks, hopped onto some waterskis and jumped over a shark.

Instead, why not try the real thing? A proper, architectural tilt-shift lens is a precision-engineered and expensive piece of gear, but Photojojo’s Tilt-Shift Camera has a real shifting lens, and costs just $150.

Technically, it should be called the Tilt Camera as it lacks the “shift” part which lets you moves the lens up and down like you would slide the two sides of an Oreo over the melted filling within. This lets the photographer correct converging verticals, which you probably don’t care about anyway.

Moving the angle of the lens moves the angle of the focal plane, which is usually parallel to the “film” plane. Thus you can make people and buildings look tiny, or you could make the whole top of your dinner table be in sharp focus, from end to end.

You pictures are recorded onto a 5MP sensor, shutter speeds run from 1/4 to 1/3000 sec, and you can even shoot tilt-shift video at 640 x 480 pixels. Round back there’s a 2.4-inch LCD, up top you’ll find a flash, and you can also mess with your photos using some built in Instagrammatical effects.

It looks like a lot of fun, and the resulting images seem to make much more convincing miniatures than software-based filters. The Tilt-Shift Camera is available now.

Here’s The Thing With Ad Blockers

We get it: Ads aren’t what you’re here for. But ads help us keep the lights on. So, add us to your ad blocker’s whitelist or pay $1 per week for an ad-free version of WIRED. Either way, you are supporting our journalism. We’d really appreciate it.